Brady's Bunch

As the first offers to buy New York magazine came in to Herbie Allen's offices in Manhattan last Monday, I lunched at Michael's with the publisher of the greatest of the big city weeklies. Lawrence C. Burstein, tall, gray & handsome, has seen it all: 10 previous years under Ed Kosner at New York; founding publisher under Jann Wenner at Us Weekly; time served at Conde Nast; a dot-com debacle; so he's pretty cool. And after just three months in this tour as publisher, he's accentuating the positive. Says Larry, we in the media may be obsessed by the possible sale of the mag Clay Felker created; the readers aren't, nor are the advertisers or the agencies. Maybe they're curious, but they're still reading, still buying space. He claims circ is a steady 450,000, ad pages are up YTD by 5%, their Web site gets 800,000 unique visitors a month and turns a profit, and he's just lured Risa Aronson of Fairchild's W as new ad director.

Smithsonian magazine Publisher Amy Wilkins hosts a lunch tomorrow at the Four Seasons in Manhattan at which local movers & shakers will hear architect Daniel Libeskind talk about his plans for Ground Zero.

Tonight at Sotheby's Harper's Bazaar Editor Glenda Bailey and David Granger of Esquire are giving a preview cocktail for a show of Henry Wolf's wonderful magazine and other design, photography and paintings.

Sunset assigned travel and tourism sales in Hawaii to the Honolulu office of Publicitas North America. Hawaii is the No.1 travel market for their readers.

"The Catholic Girl's Guide to Sex" will be published today; it's $9.95 and from Broadway Books, New York. Co-authors are Melinda Anderson and Kathleen Murray with illustrations by Alli Arnold. The nuns get equal time next week in this column.

That Business Week remake, "and other works of modern art," will be unveiled Sept. 25 at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Can this really be so? National Geographic Traveler's September issue reports that tour operators now think this is a jolly good time to plan "a holiday in Iraq."

Resolved: That this House deplores the wearing of baseball caps on court in the U.S. Open.